New year, new chance to reclaim humanity?

By Nick Groom, author and Professor in English, Special to CNN

Updated 8:14 AM ET, Mon January 6, 2014

Photos: Bringing in 201445 photos

Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks fill the air over the San Francisco skyline, near the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, as part of New Year's Eve celebrations just after midnight on Wednesday, January 1. Click through to see other New Year's celebrations around the world:

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Bringing in 2014 – Revelers cheer under falling confetti at the stroke of midnight during New Year's Eve celebrations in Times Square, New York City, just after midnight on January 1.

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Bringing in 2014 – Isabel Lord wears a pair of 2014 glasses during First Night in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 31.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks explode above the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, skyline as part of New Year's celebrations on January 1.

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Bringing in 2014 – Revelers gather on Duval Street in Key West, Florida, to celebrate the new year.

Bringing in 2014 – Brad and Amber Kerman of Ventura, California, kiss as the ball drops during the New Year's Eve party in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Wednesday, January 1.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks light the sky over Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro just after midnight on Wednesday, January 1.

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Bringing in 2014 – A woman holds a champagne bottle during New Year's celebrations in Bucharest, Romania.

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Bringing in 2014 – New Year's celebrations take place in Funchal on Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic.

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Bringing in 2014 – A couple kisses by the ancient Coliseum to celebrate the new year in Rome.

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Bringing in 2014 – People celebrate the new year on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

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Bringing in 2014 – Thousands of people attend New Year's celebrations at Mont des Arts in Brussels, Belgium.

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Bringing in 2014 – New Year's fireworks illuminate the Rhine River in Basel, Switzerland.

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Bringing in 2014 – People watch fireworks explode over the Vardar River during New Year's celebrations in Skopje, Macedonia.

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Bringing in 2014 – People take part in New Year's celebrations at Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks light up Big Ben and the London skyline during New Year's celebrations.

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Bringing in 2014 – New Year's celebrations take place near the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.

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Bringing in 2014 – People ring in the new year at Cathedral Square in Vilnius, Lithuania.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks welcome the new year over the National Stadium and the Vistula River in Warsaw, Poland.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks explode over the landmark Brandenburg Gate to bring in the new year in Berlin on Wednesday, January 1.

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Bringing in 2014 – Drummers perform at the New Year's Winter Carnival in Newcastle, England.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks burst over the ancient Parthenon temple on the Acropolis hill in Athens, Greece.

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Bringing in 2014 – People ride a Ferris wheel as fireworks illuminate the sky during New Year's celebrations in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks explode near the citadel of Arbil during New Year's Eve celebrations in Irbil, Iraqi Kurdish Regional Administration, on January 1.

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Bringing in 2014 – New Year's fireworks explode over Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Dubai set a new world record for largest fireworks display, according to Guinness World Records. The show featured 400,000 pyrotechnics and spanned more than 100 kilometres (62 miles).

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks explode above the central square of Rosa Khutor ski resort, a venue of the 2014 Winter Olympics, in Krasnaya Polyana, near Sochi, Russia during New Year's celebrations.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks light up the sky over St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square as Russians welcome the new year.

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Bringing in 2014 – Pakistani youth gather to celebrate New Year's on a street in Lahore.

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Bringing in 2014 – In Mumbai, an Indian boy lights the effigy of an old man, symbolizing the burning of the past in hopes of starting a new year without bad memories.

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Bringing in 2014 – The Bangkok Ball Drop, in Thailand's capital, became the highest New Year's Eve ball drop in the world at 266 meters (872 feet).

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks light up the sky in Manila, Philippines.

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Bringing in 2014 – People perform on stage during a countdown party in Yangon, Myanmar.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks are seen over Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong.

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Bringing in 2014 – People watch a fireworks display during celebrations in Taipei, Taiwan.

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Bringing in 2014 – Laser lights shoot from towers at the Great Wall of China in Beijing.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks burst over the Singapore skyline during New Year's celebrations.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks explode over Juche Tower and the Taedong River in Pyongyang, North Korea.

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Bringing in 2014 – Buddhist monks hold candles during celebrations at a temple in Seoul, South Korea.

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Bringing in 2014 – South Koreans celebrate with drums during a New Year's festival in Jeju, South Korea.

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Bringing in 2014 – Balloons are released in Tokyo to celebrate 2014.

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Bringing in 2014 – A crowd watches the New Year's fireworks in Melbourne.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks explode near the Harbor Bridge during New Year's celebrations in Sydney. As the city's spectacular celebration got under way, six people were rescued from a sinking boat on Sydney Harbor, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

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Bringing in 2014 – Indonesian military members release lanterns into the sky from Bintan Island, Indonesia.

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Bringing in 2014 – Fireworks are set off from the Auckland Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand, to celebrate the first New Year's celebration of 2014.

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Story highlights

The shift from bells to fireworks to bring in the new year is suggestive, says Nick Groom

The world is replacing old traditions with something far louder and brasher, he says

Old customs should be revived, new ones established to reflect current values, Groom says

He argues January provides an opportunity to reclaim our individuality and our humanity

The new year emerges from the depths of winter. In many countries bells ring out at midnight on New Year's Eve -- a sound that the writer Charles Lamb described nearly 200 years ago as the most regretful sound he ever heard, reminding him of everything he had suffered or neglected in the past 12 months.

More recently, though, fireworks have usually taken over this role in providing a fanfare for the coming year all over the world, from Times Square to the beaches of Rio, to hamlets deep in the English countryside.

This shift from peals of bells to spectacular explosions is suggestive. We live now in a world that is turning its back on the old traditions and the old skills and replacing them with something far bigger and much louder, far more brash and much more expensive; a reminder too of technology and military might.

Nick Groom

My new book, "The Seasons," investigates how we are becoming cut off from the rhythm of the natural world and the ways in which the annual cycle has been celebrated for centuries. In the past, the customs and rituals that marked the passing of the year linked society and culture to the environment, and in doing so reflected their values of community and ecology.

Today, however, we are witnessing the eradication of the seasons with all-year produce and the replacement of local festivities with mass celebrations of a tiny handful of uniform events, turning contemporary society into an identikit culture with a standardized marketplace.

My answer is not only that we should revive forgotten customs, but that we can also establish new traditions that properly reflect today's values and ambitions.

In fact, the celebration of the new year is an excellent example of how quickly major festivals can be established. Just as many old English festivals have their roots in the classical Mediterranean culture of ancient Greece and Rome, so much of the English-speaking world still follows customs that originated in northeast Atlantic Britain and Ireland 200 or 300 years ago, adapting these traditions to their own climate and culture.

Tel Aviv rocks in the New Year

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London's grooviest New Year's Day Parade

The practice of kissing and singing to welcome in the new year was noted in England by the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1856, but there are in fact very few English traditions for New Year's Eve and Day -- not least because until 1752 the new year in England was celebrated March 25.

But in Scotland the practice was to begin the New Year on January 1 with "Hogmanay," which the Scots celebrate with new year customs such as "first-footing." New year celebrations in the English-speaking world are consequently cosmopolitan affairs, mixing Scottish festivities with other European traditions.

Setting the tone

The month of "January," deriving from the Latin "janua" meaning "door," is a transitional time between the old and new, the past and the future. For centuries, January was a key time for setting one's house in order and making plans for the forthcoming year.

Eat a hen in January, for instance, if you wish to live through the year; observe the weather on January 12, to get a taste of the weather for the next 12 months; and note that activities undertaken on January 1 set the tone of work for the rest of the year -- an early version of new year resolutions.

Settle down to some seasonal fare, from nutmeg cakes with currant eyes known as "Pop Ladies" to the wassail cup, a spiced drink shared among family and friends. And there's no need to take Christmas decorations down on the Twelfth Day (January 6) -- that became common practice in the nineteenth century to get everyone back to work.

Before then, it was felt that during the bleakest months of the year in the northern hemisphere there was good reason to keep one's house decorated. So the holly and the ivy, bay leaves, and mistletoe, stayed up until Candlemas on February 2, a tradition that has survived in parts of Canada.

Easter the joker in the pack

The new year also presents a more profound opportunity to reclaim our individuality and our humanity. As we look forward to the coming year, we cannot but be reminded that the calendar of every year is different: days and dates shift (will you have a weekend birthday this year?), leap days and leap years can disrupt the best-laid plans, and Easter is ever the amiable joker-in-the-pack.

The hair-raisingly complicated calculation of Easter, based on both the spring solstice and the lunar cycle, is currently computed by Catholic astronomers using a 14-step algorithm. Even so, minor variations in the Earth's orbit mean that Easter cannot be predicted with absolute accuracy.

It is a humbling reminder of the limits of human control -- and also wonderfully appropriate that such unpredictability can still structure everything from university terms to television schedules, let alone family customs in making and hiding Easter eggs.

Quirky and changeable the year may be, but then so are we -- let's celebrate that.